Accordance
by WingLancir
Summary: Why Trusting a Fourteen Year Old Boy As the Savior Of the Galaxy Is Not a Good Idea. YAOI later, ph34r.
1. Chapter 1

I own nothing, not even the duck's bad attitude. Woe.

* * *

"Teach me magic," the boy says, blue eyes bright and terrible in their earnestness. He is too old to still have eyes like that, and far too young to understand what he's asking. For all his strengths, for all his good-natured altruism and his lofty notions about justice and disconcerting enthusiasm for this hero business, the legendary Keyblade Master is still just a child.

"No," the mage answers shortly for what feels like the thousandth time. He is out of patience and intermediaries to soften his opinions about the child and the child's persistence over certain subjects. Magic is not for kids who treat their mission as a grand adventure and their battles as a game, spinning the shiny gold key like a character in an RPG when he's done cutting through darkness. The boy is strong, granted, and undeniably motivated, but in all the wrong directions. The knight says he just needs a little patience. A little time to smooth out his flightiness. The knight is better at dealing with the boy (probably because the knight has a kid of his own, while the mage merely has nephews that can only be endured in small doses), and the mage would prefer that that arrangement stay exactly how it was. Let someone who was used to dealing with thousands of annoying questions and inane requests per day do the babysitting.

The knight gives him a Look whenever the mage mentions this out loud. The mage knows it bothers the knight to see his impatience towards the boy, but he can hardly help it. If the boy wasn't the crucial element to their mission, the mage would've happily left him behind long ago and saved himself some stress and bouts of killing fury.

Oh, but he's crucial, that child. He's so crucial the mage can't stand it. Crucial should have been a strong, powerful warrior, the chosen of the Kingdom, not an untrained, untried brat from a backwater planet.

The knight keeps telling him that he shouldn't be too critical of the boy and that they don't have to worry about him anyway. Whatever else the boy is or isn't, he is exactly what they've been sent to find, he has to be, because their King knows what he's talking about and the Keyblade doesn't choose wrongly, and there is no question that the boy is the Keyblade's chosen one. He can't be anything but the key they've been searching for. He can't be anything but destiny incarnate.

That may be so, but the mage shares Leon's dubious opinion on it. The Keyblade does not choose wrongly, but surely it was getting desperate.

"Come on," the boy wheedles, holding out his arms. He _wheedles._ He might be asking for candy, or the next turn at the game controller.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because I said so."

"That's not a reason."

"It's my reason."

"You won't teach me magic, you won't let me pilot the ship…didn't your King tell you guys to help me out?"

The mage flicks a few switches on the ship console from the captain chair just to rub it in. A few weeks earlier he might have smirked while doing so but he doesn't bother now. It's not worth it, and it's also not worth it to even look up and meet the boy's inevitable pout. This ship is entirely too small to contain a self proclaimed hero's childish defiance and the mage's own fraying temper without steel doors or the knight between them. "He didn't tell us to jump when you say."

"Geez." The boy stalks off, clomping his oversize shoes as loudly as he can to announce his infantile irritation at being denied his every whim to the rest of the uncaring universe, which at the moment consists of a world skipping closet made out of gummi blocks and a sleeping knight and the vastness of space. Oh, and a seething duck.

Said duck nobly resists the urge to fry the boy crispy on his way out.

Teach him magic. Teach his coarse, clumsy, sun tanned hands how to weave energy, teach his flighty little mind to coax and command the forces that knit the fabric of the universe together. Magic is subtlety and precision, leashed destruction and the kind of meticulous discipline that can call fire by chaining together individual atoms one by one. It takes years of study. Magic is the opposite of physical strength and of simple. The boy thinks being a warrior entails hitting things with a large blunt object, and has less than any idea about what being a soldier entails. Discipline comes about as naturally to him as it would to a puppy.

A few buttons are stabbed with more force than strictly necessary and the unfolding cosmos is glared at through the cockpit's windows. Bloody stars. So many bloody stars overrun with darkness and they have to visit each, have to waste their time searching all of them one by one and they can't even 'accidentally' leave the brat behind on one.

The mage knows himself well enough to admit that some of his frustrations are not the boy's specific doing. A lot of it is natural anxiety, the result of the King's disappearance, and uncertainty over the future of the Kingdom, and the fact that they're all crammed together on this tiny bucket with only blocks of gummi between them and instant death by vacuum, and the fact that once they land there'll be nothing between them and instant death by Heartless except their own skills, and worry over whether the kid will be able to hold his own when the mage or the knight aren't watching his back, and worry over whether the kid will be able to watch their backs in return, and the knight's irritating acceptance of the whole situation when he really ought to be sharing some of the mage's concerns. They're following a child into battle and they don't dare lose him because of the Keyblade and their orders and their mission that supposedly depends on him, and all the kid has been doing is making their mission more difficult. He's an unwanted, oh so very necessary, very _crucial_ complication.

The mage respects his King and loves him like a brother, misses him fiercely when he's gone and would do anything for him, but at the moment there's only one thing that's going to happen at their reunion and it will involve a nice right hook across the jaw for saddling them with an intractable brat.

The Keyblade Master is still sulking when they hit planetside. The mage pretends not to notice the extra viciousness in the glittering arc of the Keyblade's swings and the resentful glances being cast his way. The boy's temper is good for one thing after all; he can clear Heartless faster than a high level spell when he's feeling belligerent and under appreciated. Which, to his mind, is a large percentage of the time.

The knight doesn't even have to ask if they've been arguing again. Arguing is their default state, interspersed with rare moments of cooperation due to necessity. They make only the barest effort to coordinate on the battlefield despite the fact that their lives often depend on it. The boy goes out of his way to waste potions rather than requiring curative magic when he needs the boost and the mage lets him, because the boy is the one taking the time to stock their purses with coin enough to buy as many potions as his willful little heart desires. The mage won't lift a finger to handle an enemy that's charging the boy (usually, although concern for the mission will occasionally override lack of concern for the boy's welfare) and that's exactly how the boy wants it, given his indignant squalling about interference otherwise. They fight in the same localized space but they don't fight together. Theirs is an Arrangement and the knight can dislike it all he wants, can disapprove of their bickering and wax eloquent about how much easier everything would be if they would try to get along.

The mage is _trying._ Not breaking his back for it, of course, but for the sake of the mission he's letting as much as he can slide, and it's still not enough. There's always one more thing to spark their arguments, one more thing to incite their wills to clash.

The Keyblade Master wants to pilot the gummi ship. The Keyblade Master wants to investigate this world rather than that one. The Keyblade Master wants someone to teach him combat level magics. The Keyblade Master wants to get involved with world specific incidents that fly right in the face of every non-interference policy existing. The Keyblade Master wants to be the leader of their mismatched trio and make all the decisions. The Keyblade Master refuses to even consider the possibility that the girl he's searching for and the other friends from his home and even his home itself might just be _gone,_ because that's exactly what's happened to who knew how many people from other worlds and even the chosen of the Kingdom isn't that damn special that he should expect to be the sole exception.

The Keyblade Master thinks this is a field trip rather than a war.

"Are you even paying attention!" the mage has to yell at him time and time again, although it sounds more like a squawk.

The boy just ignores him or rolls his eyes or gives him that cocky 'what do you know, duck' smirk or turns away, and sometimes sticks his tongue when he thinks the mage isn't looking.

It's on days like those that the mage considers, with an alarming amount of seriousness, just how hard it would be for the boy to get used to wielding the Keyblade one handed. Surely a legendary genius fighter of destiny, or whatever crap the myths spewed about the Keyblade's chosen, would be able to figure it out. He didn't _really_ need both of those arms.

On the days that the boy actively challenges him, the mage considers how well the boy would be able to function without a head. It can't be all that much different from the norm.

The knight watches them patiently. Where another might have pointed and laughed he simply smiles good naturedly, where another might have thrown their hands up in disgust he waits for the bickering duo to come to some sort of half ass truce so they can get their job done. Where another might have pounded their heads against the nearest wall, he remembers what it's like to raise an infant and finds the grace to endure and accept. Each time they both claim it's the other's fault. The boy rushes ahead recklessly. The mage hangs back and wastes time. The boy blows their disguises. The mage wastes energy on disguises that could be better spent in battle. The boy can't read maps. The mage isn't tall enough to read signposts. Chocolate. Vanilla. Hamburgers. Hotdogs. Ta-may-toe ta-mah-toe.

"Teach me magic."

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because you're breathing my air. Now go away."

"But—"

"No."


	2. Chapter 2

The Traverse Town posse don't know quite what to make of him when he comes to visit, this boy that is supposed to be the galaxy's savior. Their savior. The vessel of all the Kingdom's hopes and the key to their survival, according to the King.

Aerith smiles at him because Aerith smiles at everyone, and the boy doesn't see the way her gaze lingers on his back, wondering. Measuring. She knows it isn't fair to school her face into a pleasant expression and listen to him talk about his adventures while coolly weighing his health, his muscles, his soundness; judging how soon he might recover from an injury and how he can conduct himself in a life threatening battle he's going to fight on their behalf. She knows it isn't right when Leon all but kills him bringing him in the first time (and the second time, and the third time, when every return to Traverse Town equals the boy challenging Leon to Yet Another Rematch that the boy never wins but his ego won't let him give up), but she says nothing. She can't help herself. None of them can. They've been waiting so long for this. They've waited years for this child to be born and grow up and come to them as a savior, and now that he's here they are being faced with the reality that maybe they should have waited a little longer.

The boy calls Aerith ma'am for the longest time. He blushes when she smiles and stumbles over his words in his haste to apologize for things that aren't his fault. She wishes he wouldn't. She doesn't want to send a polite stranger out to die.

Cid growls and chews his cigar even more resentfully than usual. "He don't look much like destiny," is the pilot's terse observation. "But what the hell do we know? If he's it, he's it."

Aerith says he has to be. Like the knight, she trusts the King implicitly and the fact that the boy carries the Keyblade has to prove something, doesn't it?

Yuffie nods emphatically.

"He's something special, my ninja senses can tell." She swats Cid for the face she's knows he's making behind her back. "He's what we've been waiting for. He will be. I'm sure of it."

The boy gets along best with Yuffie, to the surprise of no one. She's closest to his age and closest to his mentality (he would die of mortification before ever admitting this, of course), and they're an oddly suited pair, with her shit eating grin and his complete inability to tell lies with a straight face and both of them blaming the other for whatever mischief they've managed to get into. They're a terror to both Heartless and humans denizens of Traverse Town. Yuffie teases him because Yuffie teases everyone, and the boy doesn't notice that she doesn't pull the kind of pranks on him that she pulls on the others, that her including him in her hellraising amounts to a demented sort of respect from the pathological klepto ninja girl. 

Cid has about the same tolerance for the boy that he does for moogles and ninjas. Zero when they're making nuisances of themselves, which to his mind is most of the time. He bitches about the state of their gummi ship and the complete lack of progress he's been noticing in their respective quests and geezus, how the hell were they supposed to put their faith in a kid, a duck, and a dog. He's so antagonistic it's actually easy to ignore him, because it takes only a short time to figure out that this is simply how Cid acts with everyone. The boy steps a little more carefully around Cid than the others, mostly out of fear of the pilot's dangerous wagging cigar, but most of Cid's insults and the complaints go in one ear and right out the other.

Leon, however, is another matter. The boy hasn't forgiven the scarred man for the events of their first meeting and, given his instinctive bristling defensiveness whenever someone brings it up, likely never will. If the fight is mentioned he mumbles a different excuse every time and then falls suspiciously, leashed-explosion silent, and half a second later will have come up with the lamest excuse to revisit Traverse Town.

I'll win this time for sure, he says, running a hand over the Keyblade's length in bloody minded anticipation before smacking it firmly into his gloved palm. I'll get him back. Just you watch.

He never does. It's like a running gag to the King's men and the Traverse Town posse. Leon, after enough wheedling to drive any person to the end of their sanity, will grudgingly agree to some kind of 'sparring match' and then, about two seconds in, knock the boy flat with the gunblade and stride off without a word or a backward glance. The boy pounds the cobblestoned street with his fist. The boy glares at the line of Leon's iron straight back and his flat, uncompromising gaze and seethes with frustration. It's a little bit more complicated than rivalry and ego. It's a test of the Keyblade Master's worthiness, and the boy knows that he fails it in Leon's cold eyes every time they come back to Traverse Town. The boy knows that Leon believes the Keyblade might have been better off in other hands, and can't stand that knowledge.

So he's a little sideways around Leon, some of it being the belligerent male ego trying to challenge a perceived rival and some of it being the child in awe of the fighter he's always dreamed of becoming himself someday and the rest of it being a desire to prove himself to the only one who matters, the fellow fighter. The come-before hero. Nevermind that Leon would be the first to announce that he isn't and never had been any kind of hero. He scowls at the boy's attempts to get his attention, is barely civil in their grudging conversations, openly doubts the boy's capability with the Keyblade, unmercifully pounds the boy into the street in their matches and never seems to feel the slightest amount of guilt about it, and the boy just keeps coming back for more.

"Masochist," Leon mutters as the boy peels himself off the street and stumbles painfully over to shove a laughing Yuffie and endure a potion from the knight. "He doesn't know when to give up."

"He likes you." Aerith's hand lingers on the scarred man's arm, green healing light sinking into a torn muscle. The Keyblade was still a formidable weapon even in untrained hands, and packed quite the punch whenever the boy managed to land a hit.

Leon flinches from the sting of the injury or the observation (or both) and grounds out a terse denial. He misses Aerith rolling her eyes. The mage, strolling over to see the aftermath, does not.

"Settled any burning questions about authenticity yet?" he inquires. Aerith shoots him a Look and Leon winces again at her hand suddenly clenching his wounded arm.

"Of course not," she says, poisonously sweet. "There wasn't any _question_ to begin with, now was there?"

"If you say so, miss Gainsborough."

"I do, Mister Royal Court Wizard."

Leon tactfully withholds his opinion on the subject, knowing Aerith would be the first to jump on him and the mage wouldn't lift a feather to stop the rant, even if he privately agreed with Leon. As Cid said, who could tell what form destiny might take. All they have for a clue is the key and the King's words, and for Aerith and Yuffie that might well be enough. Leon isn't so sure. The others are not soldiers, and while Leon knows the value of faith and ideals and what kind of acts 'destiny' can inspire, his trained eyes look past the Keyblade to a child who smiles too brightly and laughs too easily and gets far too caught up in this rivalry with a stranger which (as Yuffie never fails to maliciously remind him) is starting to scarily resemble puppy love.

Still, he has to grudgingly admit, it's better than no hope at all. And for all the boy's immature tendencies he's certainly no slouch with his weapon.

"Do you think he's the real thing?" Leon questions the mage while the boy is out with Yuffie terrorizing the town/demolishing its Heartless population and Aerith is …somewhere else. Anywhere else. "He's been out in space with you now for …"

"You've fought with him." The mage doesn't want to answer this question, doesn't want to speculate about things that could make or break this fragile beacon of hope they've found by luck or fate or cruel irony. Telling dismal tales about the boy's performance isn't going to help anything. "Can't you warrior types instinctively sense things about each other when you duel, or something?"

"Only if they're the type that expounds their dramatic history during the duel." Leon eyebrows at him. "Can't you magic types sense great destinies?"

"Only if they're wearing the 'great destiny +1' T-shirt." The mage flips his wand, annoyed. "He's a brat, I can tell you that."

"Your partner said you might say that."

"You think my perspective's skewed because I don't get along with kids? I get along fine with kids, as long as they're kept at least a room away. I wouldn't care how old he is if he could do the job."

Leon's expression darkens. "You think he can't."

The mage shrugs. "Who can tell? He's got the blasted key. He's got the key and it obeys him, and he fell out of the sky and in with us awfully conveniently. I'm not an expert on great destinies and the people meant to fulfill them. You should ask Merlin about it, when he returns, I suppose." Pause, a thought striking. "Merlin…_is_ returning, right? Queen Minnie mentioned that the King had been in correspondence with him…"

"He's coming back," Leon assures. "He does this all the time. We're just as anxious for him to return as you are."

"I doubt that." The Traverse Town posse wants to ask Merlin his opinions on the Keyblade and the Keyblade's apparent chosen; the mage wants to ask Merlin where the hell their King was and what was going on with the Heartless and how they ought to handle it and if the infamous enchantress Maleficent was really still alive and active as the rumors said she was and if the mage could possibly borrow a few tomes of magic and for an autograph or five and then, maybe, if he remembered, about a spiky haired brat and his oversized magic key.

Leon pinches the bridge of his nose, a familiar habit when he was stressed or headaching or about to take someone's arm off with his gunblade. "Merlin may not be able to tell us anything, of course. 'Destiny isn't a thing to be predicted and measured' is just the sort of thing he would say."

The unfinished end of that statement was 'just to piss me off.'

"Isn't it annoying how cryptic these magic types can be?" the mage asks blandly.

"We're putting all our trust in that kid." 

"He knows."

Leon has the good grace to look a little guilty at that. "If he were older …"

The mage casually fries a Heartless shadow that had been creeping up behind the scarred man. "If he were older, he might be asking these kinds of questions too. Perhaps we're lucky he's the way he is."

The boy of course chose that moment to go streaking over the rooftop above them, squalling like a wet cat and conspicuously not wearing pants. He was chasing after a familiar blur of ninja girl waving something red.

"…or maybe not."


	3. Chapter 3

The boy is standing at the port window in the gummi ship, fingers pressed to the glass and so close he's fogging it with every faint exhalation. His expression is a perfect blank, but his eyes give away what he's thinking as if he'd been shouting it.

He has no idea what he looks like, reflected against the starry black.

A world searched. Two worlds. Three. No King, no lost friends. Nothing but Heartless and more riddles, more mysteries to taunt them, and the boy is all but choking on the unaccustomed taste of despair. He's only now begun to realize what is to have to search an entire galaxy for something you've lost.

"Say something to him, why don't you."

In the cockpit, the mage eases the ship into a gentle roll, eyes fixed on the monitor readings. "I don't have anything to tell him that he doesn't already know."

The knight frowns faintly. "But wouldn't you want to hear someone encourage you not to give up hope?"

"If he needs us to tell him that, he'll never find those friends of his."

The boy's fist impacts the reinforced window. "I can't give up," he mutters, reflection gritting its teeth. "I won't."

"He's got to believe it himself," says the mage.

They search another world to no avail. The boy might be getting a little desperate, because for once he stays close to his companions and doesn't mouth off and simply concentrates on searching, lips pressed into an unhappy line as location after location turns into a dead end. There's nothing here but shadows. 

He destroys them mechanically, attacks economic rather than enthusiastic, all his energy controlled and trained on getting to the next area. To see if anyone was waiting for him around the corner.

He doesn't take the consistent disappointments well.

"Is this what it's going to be like!" he bursts out, as the mage readies the ship for take-off. "We just look and look and look and never find anything?"

"If you haven't noticed, it's a large galaxy," the mage replies tartly. "We search in a grid pattern, one world at a time, and check in with the guys at Traverse Town at intervals. You think it would be any better to just dash off to haphazard worlds and hope we get lucky?"

"We're dashing off to organized worlds and hoping we get lucky right now," the boy mutters miserably, folding his clumsy limbs into the co-pilot's chair. He stares morosely out the main viewport.

The mage resists the urge to tell him to grow up. It's a valid concern, that they'll have missed the King even if they methodically search every world; it's just annoying to hear the mage's own fears coming out of the brat's mouth.

"It doesn't matter," he says brusquely. "Goofy and I, we'll just keep looking until we find him. Looking is the only thing we _can_ do at this point, so that's what we're going to do. There's no point in getting worked up."

"Who's getting worked up?" Defensive bluster, as if the boy hadn't come to him with fear behind his expression and pleading behind his words. The boy wanted someone to tell him that it was all going to work out. He wanted someone to say that everything would be okay, they'd find their friends and discover the secrets of the Heartless and defeat them and all the worlds would be restored and everything would be happy and shiny again. A child's desire. A child's belief in no consequences, that the adults had a plan for Handling This because adults had plans for handling everything (it was what made them adults), that they would somehow be able to make everything better. 

Well the mage didn't have a plan and the knight didn't have a plan and their allies didn't have a plan; they were all putting their faith in the King's plan and in a magic key and a boy that fell out of the sky as much as said boy was putting his faith in them that they would tell him where to go and what to do. They were all of them flying blind and against the wind.

And the person that was supposed to be their destined savior wanted reassurance.

"If you're not going to have any confidence in the search, you'll never find your buddies," the mage informs the boy harshly, accent thick with scorn. "You may as well just give up. Maybe if you mope in one place long enough they'll eventually come find you."

There's a brief stunned look, the boy not expecting an attack when he'd come like a kicked puppy looking for sympathy. It's almost comical how quickly he flashes from depression to anger in response. "I'm not giving up," he snarls, half-rising and one hand even extending to summon the Keyblade as if he could physically smash the doubt that had been raised. "I'll never give up on them. I'll find Kairi and Riku no matter what."

"Oh good. I'm sure they'd be happy to know that you were still interested in finding them rather than whining about how hard it'll be."

The boy glares. The mage glares back. The boy flings himself out of the chair and stalks out of the cockpit. The mage finishes the start-up sequence, muttering. They don't speak to each other until three worlds later, after the knight takes the boy aside for a few talks about faith and unspoken concerns and trigger buttons and how not pushing them made life easier for everyone.

The boy just gives him a blank look, and the knight sighs. "It isn't possible for you two to get along?"

"He starts it," the boy mutters. "He always starts it. He just can't get off my case."

"Aww, he's just worried about the mission…"

"That's the only thing he cares about, the stupid mission!" the boy yells. "What about my friends? What about my home? What about all the things your King said about the Keyblade? How am I supposed to save anyone with a stupid magic weapon if he won't teach me how to use magic? What about---" He stops, breathing too fast.

The knight just looks at him sympathetically. The boy's shoulders jerk, his gaze falling to the floor and all that mess of hair acting as a shield. Anything but to have to face the knight's compassion.

"I…I'm sorry— " he starts.

"Gonna cry?" the mage inquires from the doorway, leaning against it.

The boy's head jerks up. His death glare is somewhat marred by the overbright shine in blue eyes.

"No," he snarls.

"Cos if you are, take it outside so I don't have to listen. Some of us are trying to do our jobs around here."

"Fine." The Keyblade flares to life in the boy's clenched fist. "I'll be outside doing _my_ job. That's what I'm here for, right? That's all you need me for."

"No," the mage says candidly. "That's not what I need you for. That's what everyone needs you for. Aerith, Yuffie, Cid, Leon, your friends and your parents and everyone at our castle and on all the worlds—that's what _they_ need you for."

The boy has no good answer for that, anger brought up short like a dog that's run the length of its chain and is jerked off its feet at the end. He just stands there, fists clenching and unclenching uselessly, trying and failing to come up with some way to deny what the mage had said.

The mage waits, but the boy has had enough. He's too close to tears for any kind of final retort so he just turns tail and runs, and the mage lets him.

For the next three days the only thing the boy does is slaughter Heartless like a soul possessed. Without complaint, without hesitation, without anything save for pure, blind fury.

The mage accepts this sudden bloodthirsty dedication without comment, at least until he notices the knight giving him a Look.

"What?"

"You're doing this on purpose," the knight accuses, long face pulled into a frown.

"We don't have time to babysit. Either he learns how to handle himself or he'll stay a brat. Dead weight. We can't afford dead weight."

"Upsetting him deliberately isn't going to make him stronger."

The mage doesn't have to say it. The sound of the boy taking out his rage on a Heartless that would've otherwise required all three of them attacking to bring it down is answer enough. The Heartless shakes the ground when it falls and fades away to reveal the boy, panting and sweat streaked but nowhere near his limit. He glares deliberately at the mage before launching himself at the next target.

The knight is still frowning.

"This mission is bigger than him and more important than his personal feelings," the mage reminds his partner. "He's got to learn that. If he has to hate something, he might as well be productive about it."

"He'll hate _you._"

The mage hesitates for the barest second, but then shrugs it off. "He'll get over it eventually."

The knight isn't so sure. He watches them both with unconcealed concern, wondering how far the mage's ruthless efficiency will push the boy before he snaps and pushes back, but as it turns out he needn't have worried. The boy doesn't have it in him to hate. He can be surly and selfish and ill tempered but it passes; he's too much of a good-natured child to be anything but fleeting and childish in his resentment. He's back to his old self in no time at all, detouring needlessly while planetside and getting into unnecessary trouble whenever possible and arguing with the mage. They glare at each other and test each other's limits and generally squabble whenever the slightest opportunity presents itself. The boy pesters the mage to teach him magic and the mage refuses. The mage pesters the boy to be more responsible (by the mage's definition of the word, anyway) and the boy lashes out. Their compulsion to squabble is apparently pathological, and makes the knight wish for the uncomplicated trials of raising an infant. He worries mildly over a sudden bout of deafness that breaks out on one of the worlds; both of his companions talking through him to each but somehow unable to hear his or each other's replies.

"We're staying here for the night."

"We're going exploring."

"I said we're staying here."

"I said we're moving on."

"Come on, Goofy."

"Come on, Goofy."

They glare daggers at each other, and the knight wishes he'd thought to bring a book. Or at least headphones.

One would think that fighting next to each other, saving each other's hides time and time again, scraping by on what meager income they have next to each other, and seeing new sights and braving dangers next to each other would instill some kind of status quo. An equilibrium. An unspoken I do this and you do that, and we all step around each other and it works fine. One would think that after all this time, there'd be _some_ vague, pathetic iota of teamwork involving in their interactions.

Maybe some other mage and some other Keyblade Master. Mastering the arcane arts requires tenacity of the highest degree, and only the King knew what sort of stubbornness could persuade a magical key to accept you as its bearer.

"He wants me to teach him combative magic," the mage rants to the knight in one of their too tiny ship cabins, the one he's appropriated for the night. They're grounded, they've a very nice tent and a wonderful large clearing to set it up in and a big lovely open sky to do it under, but the kid is out there with his mouth and his ego and the mage can't stand another minute of it. He'll sleep on bare iron floor just so the boy can have the tent, so the boy can pretend it's a happy fun camping trip and, most importantly, so the boy will be _somewhere else_ for four or five hours. Or until he discovers some new complaint, or raises his voice in some typical exclamation of pointlessness. It can penetrate through the ship's hull, the mage is positive.

"_Offensive_ magic. Fireballs and craters and 'boom,' like he says." The mage angrily swipes a hand through the air. "We're supposed to be protecting these worlds, not tearing them up."

The knight looks like he's considering something. Never a good sign. "It might be a good idea to teach him eventually," he drawls finally, accent honey thick and unchanging no matter how many worlds they've visited or will visit. "That key channels magic, like you said, so he'll have to learn how to use it at some point and you can't exactly stop him from practicing on his own. Teaching him might at least prevent accidents later on?"

Cloaked in the knight's patient and oh so reasonable tones, the suggestion doesn't sound so much like the complete and utter impracticality the mage knows it to be. Somehow, that's almost more annoying than the boy being demanding about it. The mage doesn't want patience. The mage doesn't want pragmatism or even resignation. He wants a supporter, and who was the knight friends with anyway, the longtime ally or the upstart?

'Both' is not the answer the mage wants to hear, nor is endorsement of something the boy had suggested.

"Sure." The mage snorts. "So he can blow us up in battle with a miscast, or melt a hole through the ship trying to light a candle while we're between worlds."

The knight demurs, he doesn't think that likely at all. The boy is very reliable in his own way, really, or he tries to be. Under all the unpolished edges is the hint of their prophesied hero, the blazing righteous spirit of the savior they've been looking for. The boy has foundations. The boy has talent. The boy _is_ learning. He's getting better and stronger and more comfortable with himself as the Keyblade Master with each locked star. One simply has to anticipate his …temporary lapses.

"His complete and utter lack of good judgment, you mean."

"You were young once, too," the knight says, finally annoyed or what passed for 'annoyed' within his perpetual mellowness.

The mage doesn't have anything to say to that. He glares instead and the knight blinks placidly, and after a terse 'I'll think about it' the knight very chivalrously retreats with his victory. The mage puts off doing anything constructive in favor of some good old-fashioned silent, wrathful brooding.

It's the big bleeding problem right there isn't it, he thinks sourly, watching his old friend tromp gracelessly towards the airlock (no wonder he and the boy got along so well, with their similarities). The big bleeding problem with the boy that no one can do anything about, not even the boy himself.

It's the fact that he's a child. The boy is a teenager, all of fourteen years out in the world and most of them spent on an unremarkable spit of beach playing in the waves with his friends. He doesn't know crap about space travel or invasions of darkness or keyblades, and why should he be expected to? He doesn't have any precedents on a disconnected, peaceful world. He's got no standards of heroism or soldiering except what he's heard about in storybooks. He had no life threatening disasters before this one to teach him about duty or priorities. The mage wonders sometimes if their mutual resentment is really a result of the arguments or because of what they see in each other; what one used to be and regrets leaving, and what one could mature into and dreads becoming.

The mage hopes desperately that innocence is not what drew the Keyblade. They might be able to keep the boy alive, might be able to take him to all the places his quest and his destiny requires, but the mage knows as sure as the sun will rise that they're not going to be able to keep him innocent. Every battle, even the ones that the boy thinks are games, are going to teach him about pain until, (worst case scenario, but the mage has always been a pessimist at heart), it becomes the only thing he knows. And it isn't as though anyone would ask it of him. It isn't as though anyone would want that for him, or for any child. But it can happen and it will happen and the mage knows that that how the boy copes will decide whether they'll have a Keyblade Master afterwards, or just a broken shell.

It's enough to earn the King two right hooks in the mage's mental tab. Making them watch that. Making them a party to it.

But there's no choice. They're stuck with this mission, stuck with the boy and he with them and they may not be the best of friends but they're all they've got out in enemy territory.

"I suppose we ought to be thankful he's lasted this long," the mage grudgingly admits.

The knight drapes an extra blanket over the boy, sprawled boneless in his sleep and fingers twitching as he dreams. "I think you're underestimating him."

"Whatever."

The boy mumbles something. It sounds an awful lot like 'teach me magic.'

The mage's hands tighten on his wand as he resists the urge to swat the kid.

"….so are you ever going to..." the knight begins after a moment.

"No."

"But he …"

"No." The mage looks briefly annoyed. "It wouldn't do any good if I tried to teach him, okay? He's not ready."

"How will you know when he's ready?" the knight persists.

"I have mage senses," the mage snaps. "They'll tingle."

"…gawrsh, really?"

"No. Now shut up, we're landing."


	4. Chapter 4

The boy absolutely refuses to drop this magic business. He gets more and more frustrated with each denied request but soldiers on, bringing it up in company so the mage has to make excuses not only to the boy but to the knight and the gang at Traverse Town. The mage has also caught the boy watching him from under lowered lashes more than a few times, mimicking the mage's actions during spellcasting as if declaring that, fine, he doesn't need a teacher, he'll just get the hang of it on his own, he's the Keyblade Master and he can do anything and everything all by himself. He doesn't need instruction. He doesn't need _help._

What's worse is that he imagines it to be a secret, those few spells he's finally managed to activate. He's oh so very careful to hide his practice trials, so cautious about not using magic in front of his companions, no doubt planning to impress them both one day with some kind of convenient and showy exhibition that the boy will just casually dismiss as 'a few things he'd picked up here and there.' Eager to impress, like any child.

The mage doesn't have to see anything to know what's going on. He can smell the disturbed energy in the air like ozone. He can feel the roiling currents left in the wake of the boy's clumsy handling, like the bubbles and churning water left behind by a boat propeller in the ocean. Sometimes he'll even notice it in the confined air of the gummi ship, which never fails to trip all his internal alarms. All it takes is one fire spell to eat up all their oxygen or blow out the side of the ship and the boy is all too capable of triggering just such a result accidentally. The Keyblade has to be acting as an enhancer for the boy's meager natural talents; no untrained amateur should be able to 'copy' spells just by seeing them performed a few times and then mimicking the caster's actions.

The mage thinks, and not for the first time, that the Keyblade is a truly powerful tool, or it would be if it weren't in the hands of an idiot.

The boy melts a hole in the ship's hull perhaps a week later, trying out a light spell that he'd either copied or wheedled out of someone, the mage never finds out which. Fortunately, they're not in space at the time. The mage screams himself hoarse, cursing the boy for doing it, the whoeveritwas that might have taught him the spell, the Knight for not stopping it, the King for being the cause of everything in the first place, and himself for being too good to stoop to infanticide.

Cid is roaring and chomping at them even before they limp into port, a near seamless blend between the rant on the viewscreen and them opening the hatch to hear it live. Weeks, he growls, chewing furiously on his cigar. Weeks it'll take to fix this, what the hell were you doing with it, goddamn _civilians_ trying to handle delicate equipment they'd no training with, letting kids mess with it. 

"They don't let me pilot," the boy grumbles, entirely missing the point.

The mage pointedly doesn't say anything about asteroids, even at the risk of privately agreeing with Cid which was only slightly worse than publicly agreeing with Cid. Mages and engineers don't get along on principle.

So they're stuck in Traverse Town yet again (which has never seemed smaller), stuck with Traverse Town's Heartless denizens barely putting a dent in the boy's overabundant energy stockpiles and stuck with Traverse Town's human denizens getting more and more politely desperate. The boy has a thing for rooftops and amazingly inconvenient unlocked doors. He and Yuffie are unholy terrors and no one believes for a moment that teaching the boy 'how to ninja' has anything to do with training to fight the Heartless.

It takes only a short while for the delay to chafe both guests and hosts; Cid forced to resort to chasing the boy out of his shop with the business end of a very wicked looking spear and Leon taking to disappearing for entire days so the boy can't pester him for matches. Suddenly all the townspeople have Looks and Cid has Looks and Leon has Looks and even patient and saintly Aerith has Looks, and the mage wants to know who put the sign on his back that says Responsible For Stupid.

"This is supposed to be our savior?" Leon demands out of the boy's hearing, stormy gray-blue gaze cold on the teenager's poorly restrained exuberance as he chases Yuffie around. The boy is nursing a few strained tendons, results of his own enthusiastic idiocy during yet another ill-fated sparring match. Leon hadn't even need to knock him down this time. "I thought you two were supposed to be teaching him how to fight. We need him to fight."

"He can fight just fine," the mage snaps back, sick of this conversation and the fact that the boy is not doing anything to inspire anyone's confidence. "The Keyblade takes care of itself."

"He's going to get killed if you let this continue." Leon isn't taking the boy's injury well, as if it were some kind of personal insult to himself.

"Who said I'm in charge of him?"

"He's only fourteen," comes the reply after a second's pause, and the mage resists the urge to roll his eyes. Of course. Iceheart's only weakness, his oh so tragic past. A few too many hits across the boy's thick skull and Leon is starting to see defeat in him, great destiny be damned, the same helpless defeat that a younger Leon had suffered at the claws of the Heartless when Radiant Garden fell. Suffered and never recovered from.

Which still isn't the mage's problem. He whips out his wand and zaps a shadow Heartless that had appeared across the square. "So train him why don't you, if you're so worried."

"What?"

"He whacks things with a blunt object. You whack things with a pointy object. He'll do anything you ask if you throw the word 'rematch' in there ….or actually, he'd do anything you ask anyway."

Leon's scowl is almost worth the irritation of this conversation, and the mage smiles unkindly. "Anyway, I'm sure you can teach him much more about how to stay alive than I can, seeing as you're so good at it."

The scowl disappears as Leon's face shuts down. He's never forgiven himself for surviving where others from his world did not, and everyone knows it, and the mage almost, almost feels bad for using it as a weapon, except that Leon is supposed to be the leader of the Traverse Town faction which is allied with the King, and so far all he's done by way of 'help' for the King's men is shove the boy at the them and then bitch about their lack of progress.

The mage tells himself he is a very unscrupulous duck, and that he will feel very bad about this later, and pushes the dagger in deeper. "It's probably best that we came in when we did, anyway. We met up with some nasty creatures on that last world and he rushed in, of course, before we could catch up, and by the time we got there— "

Leon cuts him off far too quickly to even pretend that his frigid disinterest is still genuine. "You said he could handle himself."

"I am not a blademaster, and neither is my partner," the mage bluntly informs the scarred man. "_You_ are. If you're not going to train him, don't whine at me when he gets hurt because he's untrained."

"If he got hurt, it would be because you allowed it." Leon had never been a gracious loser.

The mage shrugs as he saunters off, triumphant. "Pain is the best teacher."

When the boy comes running up to him later, all but bursting at the seams with excitement because omigosh omigosh Leon was going to teach him Leon was actually going to spend time with him and train him omigosh, the mage can't resist tossing a wink at the knight's mildly incredulous expression.

"And here I thought you didn't like him," the knight remarks once the boy is gone, cautiously pleased on the boy's behalf but unsure of what could have possibly prompted the mage to do something for their third.

"Are you kidding?" The mage cackles. "Leon will pound him into the concrete and he'll just ask for more. He'll be so busy collecting bruises from his idol he'll finally leave me alone about teaching him magic. I should have done this weeks ago."

The knight just sighs his patient sigh. So much for altruism.

Handing the boy off to Leon proves to be an excellent move anyway. The boy's idol worship complex is rocked a bit by the shock of reality, that Leon wasn't going to pull any punches during this training and wasn't going put up with anything less than the boy's most sincere, concentrated efforts. Leon proves in some way the mage had never been able to impress on the boy that this isn't a game, and slowly, ever so slowly, the seriousness of the scarred man's attitude towards fighting the Heartless leeches into the boy's own. There are even fewer complaints in the field, less of 'why me' and more of 'for the sake of those that can't defend themselves.' 

"Don't strain anything patting yourself on the back," Cid comments sourly, annoyed by the mage's vindictive glee. "He may be learning how to swing around that stick of his, but Iceheart'll fuck him up just by association. He won't learn cooperation in battle. Leon's never heard of it."

Leon had, actually, he just preferred to fight without the company of crotchety pilots and klepto ninjas and occasionally overbearing flower girls who had never learned to take his orders as a commander and never would. And, personal lone wolf preferences or not, Leon had been a dedicated soldier on his homeworld, and like any soldier he'd been trained in melee combat, how to work around and with other troops. By virtue of iron will and patience and the unforgiving flat of his gunblade (and just to spite Cid), he inexorably drills the importance of teamwork into the boy's spiky head. It's worth enduring the boy's complaints about sadistic leather wearing crazies just to see his amazingly rapid progress with the Keyblade.

"Guard high!" Leon barks sharply, while the boy grits his teeth and whips around barely in time to block an attack by a soldier type Heartless springing on him from the roof above. The knight looks briefly worried but the mage has to resist the urge to cackle evilly. Leon believed in practical exercises, which meant live enemies, and the mage has nothing but approval for it. Leon also believed that certain comments to Yuffie about 'defeating Heartless with one hand tied behind my back' were a personal affront to whatever warrior code that the scarred man (and the boy, by default as a student) followed, and the boy now found himself facing off against a field of Heartless with one arm, indeed, strapped behind his back with two of Leon's belts.

The mage heartily approves of this as well.

"Atta boy!" he calls, as the kid is knocked off his feet by a Heartless he hadn't even seen coming and swarmed under by shadows. Leon is eventually obliged to stride over and fish the boy out by his collar.

"Is this really training?" Aerith asks waspishly. She doesn't often come to watch, and this is exactly why, with the mage's all too obvious delight over the boy getting a beatdown.

The mage looks innocent. "What else would it be?"

"Flirting," Yuffie yawns from her rooftop perch, absently twirling Conformer as she watches the boy and Leon fight back to back, the swordsman covering his student's deficiencies until the boy learned how to stop favoring his unhindered side. "Flirt flirt flirt."

"Jealous?" the mage needles, in far too good a mood to let Aerith's disapproval ruin it.

The ninja girl flips nimbly off the roof and lands as gracefully as any dancer, grinning her most untrustworthy grin. "I saw him first. You should have sent him to me for training."

"Light forbid," Cid mutters, shouldering past them with a crate of parts. "One of you's bad enough."

Yuffie's magnificent comeback is interrupted by a shadow crawling up from the cobblestones between them, a straggler from the designated arena, so she settles for sticking her tongue out at Cid and swatting the Heartless in his direction before dashing over to run damage control on the other crawlies that were straying out of the combat zone to hone in on hearts more vulnerable than Leon's and the boy's. Cid loses his cigar screeching obscenities after her, dancing around trying to avoid the shadow while keeping his hold on the full crate.

Later, with all Heartless cleared and lesson learned, the boy drops down to one knee, hanging off the Keyblade, exhausted and out of breath and something close to hard won contentment on his face when Leon offers him a gloved hand and a rare, quiet word of approval. It matches the distant satisfaction that is Leon's expression, and for a moment elder and younger look exactly the same.

The last one left watching from the top of the stairs, the mage idly decides he doesn't exactly disapprove of this. For the moment.


End file.
